Plane Old Reviews

Hello and welcome to some very short reviews I'm writing about things I've seen in the last week. In the last few days I have been mostly in the sky or playing a game at Sony's Santa Monica studios, but before leaving I watched Tim Burton's latest couple of films for a DVD & Blu-ray Review feature, and then a bunch of stuff on the plane. I also saw half of All The Pretty Horses on HBO in my hotel room, but shan't write about that becase a) I fell asleep half way through and b) it was proper horse wang, from what I saw.

The Corpse Bride
Signficantly less precious and 'Strange Emily' than I had feared. Not really sure why I ever worry about Burton's films - I've enjoyed basically everything he's done, even Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (there's a bit in Pee-Wee which is reference to The Bicycle Thieves and it's TOTALLY AMAZING). So this was like Nightmare Before Christmas except with fewer songs and more romance and a maggot that looked liked Peter Lorre. It's 3.5 out of 5.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street
This and Corpse Bride are, I realised as I was writing the Burton feature this week, the only two of the director's films I'd not seen at the cinema, since I was old enough to go see his films at the cinema. I'd just moved to Bath and all the music probably put me off. Which is stupid - the songs are, predictably, brilliant, and Depp-as-Todd's hair is like a magical waxy ice cream. Very bloody, lots of foggy cobbled London streets, and even Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't a complete inside-out pig of a songist. 4 out of 5.

The Informant!
Plane movie number one. I really like Steven Soderbergh rather a lot. I think. Maybe I just find his films interesting, or maybe even just fruitful to write about academically. Forgot that last sentence, it makes me sound like a moron. But the point is he's someone I tend to think I like more than the actual watching of films bears out. Like, I don't really get the fuss behind sex, lies. It's smart and okay. But I think both Soderbergh and Spike Lee are right, Do The Right Thing should've won everything that year. Kafka is okay, King Of The Hill like a well-dressed yawn, The Underneath like a blue cardboard box, Schizopolis excellent but incomprehensible, Gray's Anatomy pretty boring, Out Of Sight like a sexy tanned forearm (this is good, in the measure of things), The Limey like a fucking time travelling uncle who KICKS ASS (also good), Erin Brokovich fun and smart, Traffic a bit weighty but dramatic with five 'D's, Solaris like a purple balloon (not good), Ocean's Eleven like one of those silver balloons with George Clooney's face on (very good) and all the rest. Wow, he's done loads. The Informant! wasn't amazing. Nice touches - the voice-over that obsesses over trivialities rather than driving the narrative, Damon with just the right measure of irony to be funny and watchable - but it was stretched at nearly two hours, wasn't as snappy as it needed to be and never really punctured it's own facade to get to the emotion underneath. Clooney's Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind was similar and better. 2.5 out of 5.

Zombieland
Plane movie number two. Kicked ass. Included a pretty lady, Bill Murray, and zombies. Very little to dislike. 3.5 out of 5.

Surrogates
Plane movie number three. I like Bruce Willis and I like things that rip off Phillip K Dick, so I was all set to really enjoy this daft 'humans are confined to their apartments while controlling beautiful robot counterparts in the real world' thriller. Aside from the Willis-bot's alarming hair (the kind of blond Mr Whippy side-parting you think might suddenly open its eyes at any moment) the opening is full of nice touches - the robomen calling non-avatars 'meatbags' in a flesh-snobbery way, suggestions of emotional detachment, peeks at superhuman powers. Then it just kinda collapses like a bad cake or a heavily drugged giraffe. Everything unfolds very directly, and it ends. 2 out of 5.

Carriers
Plane movie number four. This is a low budget post-mega virus thriller with a car full of people (one of whom is Chris Pine being exactly .34 times as charming as Captain Kirk) trying to get to the beach or something. They meet Chrisopther Meloni and, freaked out by the fact his acting cock is twice as big as theirs and his daughter has the virus, they do drama for a bit before travelling together. Then they abandon him and the girl and I stopped watching because it was too manipulative and because thanks to his giant acting cock I liked Christopher Meloni loads more than any of the stupid younger stupider cast. I fast-forwarded to the end: Pine dies because he's a knob, so does his missus, but his nerdy brother and his lady friend get to the beach. Presumably they starve shortly after. 1 out of 5.

State Of Play
Watched this on the way back before falling to sleep. I sleep terribly on planes and at one point during probably mild turbulance I woke up shouting "Oh Jesus no!" a bit like Edward Woodward at the end of The Wicker Man. Clearly, it was fine. State Of Play was good fun in a twisty, overly-compact kind of way. The 'invesigative journalism good/murdering corporations bad' stick was quite meat and they beat me with it hard, like I'm pretty gay for that kind of liberalism so all good. 3 out of 5 the end.

In dreams

So my one a day run lasted not very many days until work descended. But it was fun work - on Sunday a fun thing for Total Film online, and on Monday playing the excellent, Lynch and Fincher-influenced Heavy Rain.

And after Heavy Rain I'm in the mood for some Lynch, so how about two of my favourite scenes of his. They're from his two best films, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr (yes they are), and they're connected in terms of ideas.

Lynch's films often include scenes featuring sites of performance - mini-theatrical stages, spotlights, curtains. He seems fascinated by the aesthetics of stage, the craft of wood and material to manufacture a space for experience and expression. Think the Radiator Lady in Eraserhead, Merrick's humiliation in Elephant Man, Julee Cruise's incredible moment in Twin Peaks. And also think of Dean Stockwell miming to Roy Orbison in the glow of a lamp-lit microphone in Blue Velvet.

The scene is electric: Stockwell's louche lounge act - frills, collar and pale, pale skin - and Hopper's barely-suppressed malice, eased temporarily by miming, mantra-like, along with the mime. The fixation on performance (or, here, lack of it) recurs later, when Hopper watches Isabella Rossellini sing Blue Velvet onstage while rubbing a square of actual blue velvet cut from her gown - the performance reduced to a physical object (which ties in to what I was saying before about audiences reconceiving their relationship with films and by extension music in the wake of videos). Then there's Mulholland Dr.

The Club Silencio sequence in Mulholland Dr is a contorted remake of the Stockwell scene. Again there's Roy Orbison - the song is Crying, this time, only now it's sung (or rather acted) by Rebekah Del Rio in Spanish translation. Again the scene is about mime, and as a consequence about authenticity and emotional investment in performance. I remember the first time I watched the film, in Sheffield in 2001, I felt distressed and almost cheated when Del Rio collapses. The combination of image and sound is so compelling and emotional it's hard not to feel duped when the illusion is broken, even though the creepy dude with the moustache is telling you throughout that there is no band. I don't attach any specific meaning to the scene (I think the great joy of Mulholland Dr is that is teases tangible meaning without ever surrendering it), although it's probably significant that the revelation of Del Rio's performance is the point at which the Hollywood Cinderella narrative that the film has followed unravels and twists into something darker.

One last thing - after Twin Peaks Lynch did a TV series called Hotel Room for HBO. The show itself isn't brilliant - each of the three existing episodes features a standalone drama in a hotel suite. But I've always thought the show's introductory credit sequence, narrated by Lynch, is fantastic. He sets up the hotel room as one of these sites of performance, a space for things to unfold and for stories to be told. It's really effective. Shame the stories themselves didn't quite deliver. Ach - the youtube link's been deleted, so you'll have to make do with the word themselves. Imagine Lynch saying this to images of Manhattan building works from the 1930s:

"For a millennium the space for the hotel room existed – undefined. Mankind captured it and gave it shape and passed through. And sometimes when passing through, brushing up against the secret names of truth."

EDIT: Youtube link is currently back up.

Timeshifting and Sky+

As previous posts on The Conversation and Afterlife suggested, I'm very interested in films which are about the act of filmmaking itself. Such films figure prominently in my thesis, and I think there are many more of them than may be initially obvious.

Last week I finally had Sky+ installed. It's the first time I've had a functioning television recorder for years - we still have a VCR for watching video library tapes and charity shop Disney films, but the picture quality and the practicality of using it with freeview or Sky boxes means it's not been used to record for several years. Regaining that capability with Sky+ has reminded me of a phrase used during the initial popularisation of home tape recorders which I found during my research - timeshifting.

It's a grand title for something which seems to us now so banal - recording a program and then watching it later - and it's telling that even though I grew up while VCRs were very much a novelty (child of the '80s, I lived through video nasties and watched Star Wars on video once a weekend at my Nana's house in London) I wasn't familiar with it until I read contemporary reports.

But at the time it represented a significant shift in the relationship between viewer and program. Previously, films and television had been entirely illusory - they existed only as images, sound and ideas - and entirely out of our control, shown at appointed times which audiences were forced to observe. The arrival of videotapes allowed viewers to watch on their own terms, and transformed programs and films into a physical objects on a mass scale for the first time.

This is a conceptual change as much as anything - the idea of what cinema is was changing. Several films made towards the end of the '70s and through the '80s explore this shift, and none more fully or intelligently than David Cronenberg's Videodrome. It's a film about the extension of television into consciousness, about the fact that us and the things we watch are no longer discreet and distinct parties - we are fluid and mingling. Physically so, in the film's reconfiguration of things, as shown in this brilliant scene.



And you thought it was just mental body horror with some tits thrown in.

I find films which do similar things fascinating. Douglas Trumbull's rather less well known Brainstorm was made the same year as Videodrome, 1983, and has Christopher Walken's scientist perfecting a system which can record human experiences - another intersection of technology and consciousness, and example of capturing sensory information. A little later Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape featured a man who has replaced real physical experiences with non-physical recorded ones - video as a substitute for reality.

Sky+, of course, does much more than record - it pauses and rewinds live television, and it can even analyse your habits and make program suggestions for you. It's binding us even closer to the things we watch, and blurring the lines between lived and viewed experinces even further. Needless to say, if my television hasn't morphed into a pulsating organ within six months, I'll be cancelling my subscription.

Ice and Spielberg

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go out early and buy a sledge from town for my kids. There's a park with a hill still full of snow just 10 minutes away and it's obscene I haven't bought one already. It snowed a little tonight and it's still freezing, so hopefully they'll still have decent sledging conditions.

The continued iciness combines with the Spielberg On Spielberg interview in ITV4 right now to prod this post into being. I like Spielberg a lot. Most people who don't are idiots or babies. But I've always thought that AI and Minority Report were lost opportunities - both engaging and brilliantly realised sci-fi worlds which collapse under the weight of second-chance sentimentality right at the close.

Both films come to natural if unexpected ends with their central characters defeated and literally frozen. Haley Joel Osment's super-creepy super toy is trapped at the bottom of the now solid ocean staring in to the dead eyes of a blue fairy statue, and Tom Cruise's breathless, emotionally bruised future cop has been betrayed and put in a fridge prison by the brilliant Max von Sydow. Both of these characters are haunted and damaged, desperately searching for something to fix or complete them - a lost child, a lost mother. Their apparent failure is shocking - achingly, poignantly so in the case of AI, and ironically, satisfyingly so in Minority Report.

And then both films are ruined as the stalled narratives are jumpstarted and putter along to happy, forced conclusions. Aliens rescue the robot kid. Tommy breaks out and fixes everything. What a pair of refreshing and effective films we'd have if they'd ended in ice and darkness. Shame. Watch the end of AI below to see what I mean - the voiceover, the slow reverse zoom - it's perfect. And then it keeps bloody going.

The Conversation

Talking of films which are also (kind of) about filmmaking, last weekend I came home from the pub and found The Conversation on BBC2. This was excellent. As I never tire of tediously telling people, The Conversation is an brilliant and meticulous film which is at least twice as good as the first two Godfathers put together (Coppola made The Conversation in between the two. For this reason I have a rather boring theory that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan's The Conversation - a near-perfect film made quickly between two blockbusters).

I'm hard pressed to pick a favourite scene, so instead I have three. The first is Gene Hackman-as-Harry Caul's dream sequence - a chilling existential fog in which he shouts out to an unseen pursuer "I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder". Second is the frantic hotel room search in which Harry investigates a maybe-killing, which lurches into a panicked nightmare as a flushed toilet overflows impossibly with blood. But the best bit is the opening, during which the original instance of the title's conversation takes part. Harry and three other operatives covertly record the dialogue between an unkown man and woman - like a camera crew and sound recordists setting up a shot. It's a wonderful and complex sequence of editing, the sound flitting between the traffic and burble of San Francisco and snatches of the crucial recording, with dancing analogue interference obscuring key phrases and inflections. It's also brilliantly economical, introducing us to Harry, his methods and preoccupations, and throwing in plenty of asides and atmosphere too - the mime, the tramp, the girls at the window. When people say Hollywood of the '70s made the best movies there are, it's because of movies like this.

Snow: the highlights

Snow day today! The children were at home, and thanks to the lack of buses into town, so were me and Sarah.

Tonight's post is inspired by the cyncism of Andy Kelly, who on twitter earlier stated: "I refuse to do a #oneaday about snow." In the spirit on contrarianism I thought I would do exactly that, and so here are my top three films which include snow. Yeah snow! Christmas movies are disqualified for reasons of sanity (so The Nightmare Before Christmas is out, even though it's arguably a Halloween film. A shame, because this bit would've been number two). A warning: I've picked Japanese films about dying as numbers one and two, which is probably quite pretentious. And I've forgotten The Thing. Balls.

3. Eureka (1983)
Lots of justified fuss was made about the spectacular There Will Be Blood last year, but not enough about the fact that this fantastic Nic Roeg film was clearly a big inspiration. For the opening scene, imagine the intro oil-finding sequence of Blood, only with Gene Hackman instead of Daniel Day Lewis, gold instead of oil, and SNOW! instead of sand and that. Trailer here.

2. Afterlife (1993)
The hook of this strange and beautiful film by Hirokazu Koreeda is that, following death, everyone selects a favourite memory which they then experience forever. So the first portion of the film consists of improvised and real talking-head interviews (the counselling room of heaven with a odd social services feel), before the memories themselves are recreated and captured on film for eternity. As much as anything, it's a film about filmmaking - we see the makeshift, Gondry-esque special effects of heaven's film crew (cotton wool on string for clouds) transformed into perfect, glowing memories during playback - the magic of cinema. Anyway, it snows around the compound, and the best bit in the film is one elderly lady's recreated memory of sitting in a garden as pink blossom falls all around her, which is also a bit like snow. Clip here, slightly clunky US trailer here. It's really worth finding and watching.

1. Ikiru (1952)
Akira Kurosawa's best film (yes it is) about a terminally ill civil servant finally brave enough to disrupt the stifling bureaucracy in order to achieve something postive before he dies. It's a bit like a Japanese It's A Wonderful Life, only a million times better (weird fact: Afterlife is called Wonderful Life, or Wandafuru Raifu, in Japan). Anyway, one particular scene is like being stabbed through the heart with a sad icicle - when Takashi Shimura, as the civil servant Watanabe, is alone on a child's swing at night, singing a desperate song as the snow falls. It's amazing. Trailer here.

A dad's eye view

Ageing is a surreptitious bastard. I'm 28 now - manifestly so, with a tired face and two children - but a blink ago I was 7. I don't really think very differently on many levels to how I did when I was 7, and at no point have I ever stopped myself short and said, 'Now I am older, and different'. So it was odd and unexpected when cinema did it for me.

I, like most boys, grew up watching films and engaging with the younger characters. Heroes too, of course, but naturally and unselfconsciously with children, whenever they appeared onscreen. Kevin in Home Alone was a big one. Mikey in Goonies another. I had my own children relatively young - my first when I was finishing my second year at university, at 20 years old - which I think helped obscure a natural shift in this perspective.

I remember clearly the moment I realised how deeply I had come to identify with father characters - the first time I saw Finding Nemo with my son, Jay, when he was three years old. I well up like a big sad bear thinking about it even now - it's the moment when Geoffrey Rush's pelican convinces a dubious and downcast Nemo trapped in the dentist's tank that his dad has battled sharks, braved jellyfish and crossed an ocean to find and rescue him. A spark of belief and euphoria crosses Nemo's face, and he splutters "That's my dad, that's my dad!"

It's not just any kind of dad moment that gets me emotionally. It's particularly moments in which fathers make their children proud. Having my own so young I've always been very conscious of not wanting to suck at being at dad - nervous that I'm not up to it/together as a person/experienced enough. I can't put up shelves or do tax returns or other dad stuff. So more than anything, approval is apparently what I'm after, as I realised in floods of surprised tears in front of Pixar's film.

Since then, other dad stuff has come to my attention. I love more than ever the relationship between Max and his father in Rushmore. When I first saw the film Max himself was the coolest thing (I still live by the advice he hands to Bill Murray's battered Mr Blume: "What's the secret, Max? You seem to have it pretty figured out" "You've got to find something you love to do, and then do it for the rest of your life"). But now I love the subtle treatment of Max's initial embarrassment and later acceptance over his father's profession (Murray's reaction to being let in on the secret is subtle and wonderful), and I hope one day I'll be a cool enough dad to deal with my kid's embarrassment with the same warmth as Seymour Cassel ("I understand you're a neurosurgeon?" "No, I'm a barber, but a lot of people make that mistake").

Songs do the same. Glasvegas' Daddy's Gone tore me up in the first two lines, and I got the idea for this post walking home in the ice tonight listening to Simon Mayo's best-of podcast, featuring an interview with Billy Bragg and a song about the death of his father, Tank Park Salute. I'll probably post more stuff as it occurs to me. I might even do a list. A big, soppy dad list.

Public Enemies: Thoughts from a train

I wrote the following about Michael Mann's Public Enemies while travelling drunk on a train a few months ago. The details are lost to me, but go something like this: I like Mann a great deal, and remember feeling aggrieved at some po-faced and cockwards misunderstanding of the film which I read or heard somewhere or other. Drunk and on a train seemed the perfect place to right these wrongs. So please remember as you read the following: I was drunk, and on a train.


This isn’t vintage Mann. It’s not his best. But that leaves plenty of scope for beating the stern shit out of all the other macho bullshit spilling out of Hollywood, so all good.

In the end, what we have is: Better than The Keep, Last Of The Mohicans, Ali, Miami Vice and, just, Collateral. Worse than Manhunter, The Insider and, like all but maybe a dozen films ever, Heat.

It has the same men-on-the-job structure as Heat, the dynamic opposing forces intersecting briefly on the way to a fatalistic outcome. But unlike Heat, where De Niro and Pacino's connection sends sparks which flash and fizzle through to the end of the film, the distanced relationship between Depp and Bale works better than the meeting itself. That coming together, a subdued few moments in a county jail cell, reaches for and almost snatches greatness. Bale is smug and implacid as Purvis, sharp-faced, subdued, the company man. But Depp, waiting smiling in the cell, is too much for him, unbalancing the scene with a brash monologue about watching a man die, and the cold glint of the eyes. It’s too much too soon, a beat or two too early, playing on a diffident respect that Bale’s silence hasn’t yet allowed the two to establish.

But the professional male angle is still played hard, and fruitfully. People compare Mann to Hawks in his use of macho cliques, but the truth is Mann admires a far more dangerous animal: cold, remorseless, functioning psychopaths. De Niro’s McCauley is a frozen corpse of calculation, and just like the real hero of Mohicans isn’t Daniel Day Lewis but his get-shit-done dad (who’s been scalping mutherfuckers for years), so it’s not Bale or Depp who earn the most admiring looks from Mann’s camera in Public Enemies, but a steely southern agent drafted in by Purvis who consistently makes smart calls and doesn’t blink as he puts a bullet into Dillinger at the close (though he does do the honourable thing and deliver his final message: a Man, not a Monster).

A major difficulty of the film is the clash of period setting and digital video. But not, as my fear was, because it robs the gangster epic of its spectacle: the set-pieces are still luminous and grand, Dillinger bounding over bank counters just like the movies taught him to, the art-deco interiors and coat-tailed costumes looking luxurious. The problems come with crowd scenes – blurry and indistinct – and even more so with moments of intimacy. The quieter, closer sequences are lit with shadows that wreck the painterly pretence that film – celluloid – can build. These scenes look no more than the flat sum of their parts: a room, a man, a woman - there. Not strikingly immediate, as the intention presumable was, but strikingly ordinary.

For all his truth and precision, Mann’s finest moments still come when he lets his subjects explode into barely contained flamboyance. Depp wandering through the incident room daring to be captured, a pressured and possessed Purvis skipping from the footplate of a car with Thompson cracking in the darkness.

The gunfights are still a major pleasure. Unleashed in Heat’s running street battle, they reached an obscene plateau in Miami Vice, the ending of which was like having Colin Farrell fire an assault rifle directly into your ear. Here again there’s a respect of the deadly machinery, but also a revelling in the thunder of those frantic, punching bursts. Like Mann’s treatment of manhood and humanity it’s naked, desperate and dangerous. He has an uncomfortable affinity with the criminal element - no, not the criminal element, but the uncompromising element. Killers, basically.

Another start

2009 disappeared in a haze of late night writing and lack of sleep. I failed entirely to keep up either this blog or the PhD - our situation at home meant I had to take on a lot of extra work, and there simply wasn't time.

But no moping here. The PhD is, I believe from my last conversation with my unimaginably patient tutor, a going concern. And my wife Sarah recently started a full-time maternity cover job as production editor on my magazine, meaning fewer hours in write club. Spurred on by Andy Kelly's second attempt at 365-day blogging, I'll be updating here regularly (as I told Andy, I'm aiming for once every other day but twice as good as everyone else taking part) and prodding more or less effectively at the thesis.

So this is day one. I watched Dr No tonight so I'd have something to write about. Why Bond? I'm reading Mark Harris' Scenes From A Revolution which Sarah's parents bought me for Christmas. It's good - enjoyably anecdotal, well-researched and readable, and about a period of Hollywood I don't know tons about. Something that struck me in the first chapter was passage about Bonnie And Clyde screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, in Manhattan in 1962, and their shared love of Nouvelle Vague and European art films:

The last couple of years had brought an almost unimaginable wealth of world cinema to the United States, starting, as always, in New York City and then moving west. Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita - an immense exploding flashbulb of a movie - and Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura - stone-faced, elliptical, unsolvable - had arrived within weeks of each other; Antonioni's La Notte and L'Eclisse followed quickly, and that Spring, Fellini's 8 1/2 was just weeks from opening.

Mark Harris, Scenes From A Revolution p 8

It's a strength of the book that it takes well-known and familiar things and places them into an immediate context - it's fairly idiotic that I'd not considered it before, but the idea of these films arriving as a group, rather than watched as part of an established cannon, is fascinating. As is Warren Beatty's inclusion of the British films made by Woodfall by Tony Richardson and John Osborne into that same, exciting wave.

So long story short I wanted to watch a British film from the sixties, and Bond is on my shelf unwatched, even if it's at the very opposite end of the production spectrum to Look Back In Anger. I actually wanted to watch From Russia With Love - it's always looked cooler, and I have both that and Dr No on unwatched blu-ray check discs - but a geek impulse made me want to start from the beginning.

The result? Aside from the fact that Sean Connery's staggering shoulder pads make him look like Mr Incredible - cartoon superhero silhouette - and that I get a few gags in Austin Powers that eluded me previously, it turns out I have very little to say about it. It was fun, and the camera pervs at Connery at least as much as at Ursula Andress. I should probably order a dvd of The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner.